BUILT ON THE BUZZ

Drugs Like Alcohol And Tobacco Created The Modern World, Argues One
Historian, But Caffeine Still Rules It.

"Nature is parsimonious with pleasure," writes historian David Courtwright
in "Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World." Or, as we
used to say in high school, "life sucks, and then you die." But human
ingenuity has stepped in to lessen the miseries and add to the delights of
earthly existence.

Courtwright calls it "the psychoactive revolution": Compared with 500 years
ago, people across the planet now have easy access to a, well, mind-blowing
variety of consciousness-altering substances. The menu of options differs
from culture to culture -- one man's vodka martini is another's kava brew
- -- but the drive to take a temporary vacation from our normal waking state
has made some drugs into perhaps the only truly global commodities.
Virtually every language on earth has words for coffee, tea, cacao and
cola, the plants that produce caffeine.

The 5.5 trillion cigarettes smoked each year in the 1990s represent a pack
per week for every living man, woman and child.

Alcohol joins caffeine and tobacco to round out what Courtwright calls the
"big three" of currently legal psychoactive drugs.

As he sees it, modern civilization is practically unthinkable without this
trio. But why have they fared so well while equally intoxicating substances
- -- like, say, marijuana -- are banned and stigmatized, and others -- like
kava, khat and betel -- are popular only in distinct geographic areas?

And why is tobacco currently falling in popularity, while alcohol and
caffeine are holding their grip on us? These questions are only partly
answered in Courtwright's otherwise excellent book, but that's not really
his fault.

Drugs are as deceptive and multifaceted as the human beings whose
metabolisms they mess with; a history of drugs may be possible, but an
analysis of their role in culture is bound to be incomplete and
provisional. There are simply too many ways to tell the story.

Still, Courtwright's historical investigation is solid and fascinating:
Once the big three caught on among European elites, they became crucial
components in the ocean-crossing commerce and empire building that shaped
modern economies.

Tobacco, coffee, tea and spirits were lucrative; users quickly grew
dependent on them, guaranteeing a steady demand for commodities that could
be heavily taxed.

These drugs have also always been an ideal way to control and pacify
laborers, providing them with temporary relief from the fatigue and boredom
of agricultural and, later, industrial life. Some of these workers -- such
as those Eastern European peasants paid in vodka for the potatoes and grain
they delivered to distilleries or West Indian distillery workers paid in
rum -- found themselves caught in devastating economic traps.

As habits, the big three also work with and reinforce one another nicely.
Had too much to drink last night?

You'll be especially eager for that morning cup of coffee to clear your
head. If you smoke, you'll need to pour another cup, since smokers
metabolize caffeine more quickly than nonsmokers and must drink more coffee
or tea to get the same buzz. Feeling too wired now? Time for a cocktail!

Over time, as you ingest more of these substances, your body's tolerance
for each of them increases, so you need more and more to get the same
result. These endless cycles, "Forces of Habit" suggests, not only tap into
a vulnerability in the human psyche -- we're hard-wired to seek to mitigate
pain and increase pleasure -- but are also the essential building blocks of
capitalism:

The peculiar, vomitorious genius of modern capitalism is its ability to
betray our senses with one class of products or services and then sell us
another to cope with the damage so that we can go back to consuming more of
what caused the problem in the first place.

The economic impact of legal drugs extends from barley farmers to
bartenders to the social workers who run drug rehab clinics to the lawyers
who defend drunken drivers to, Courtwright playfully acknowledges, the
scholars who study the history of drugs.

But drugs are, of course, not just pleasurable and profitable -- they're
also dangerous.

Before the late 19th century, governments were aware of the destructive
properties of a wide range of drugs, but the revenues to be had from taxing
the drug trade were more compelling than the moral imperative to outlaw it.
Gradually, as the booming print media made the downside of certain drugs
more visible -- readers learned of desperate Chinese peasants enslaved to
opium and crazed students overdosing in 1890s Berlin cocaine dens -- public
demand mounted to ban some drugs outright.

The losers during this time were what Courtwright calls the "little three"
- -- opium, cannabis and coca. With narcotics like opium and cocaine,
governments justified bans by pointing to extreme and visible health
problems and social costs.

Marijuana, however, appears to have been the victim of historical bad luck:
Its health effects are no more dire than those of alcohol or tobacco, but
over the centuries the plant lacked "international corporate backing or
fiscal influence."

Unlike tobacco and alcohol, which was banned temporarily in the United
States during Prohibition but was quickly reinstated to legal (albeit
heavily regulated) status, marijuana never became part of "the personal
habits of influential leaders and celebrities." (That makes sense, of
course, given the go-go nature of capitalism and the traits required for
success -- anyone who did make marijuana part of his personal habits would
most likely not have become an influential leader or celebrity in the first
place.) Instead, the mellow plant lodged itself first in peasant and then
in youth subcultures, where it gained a reputation as a "gateway drug" to
harder, harsher illegal substances like heroin and cocaine. (It is a
gateway drug, but then so are nicotine and alcohol.)

Of Courtwright's big three, alcohol has the most fascinating and
contradictory history, and the kinds of cultural questions that its history
raises point up the limitations of Courtwright's project most obviously.
Alcohol is as lethal as they come; its score on pharmacologist Maurice
Seevers' famous 1957 "addiction liability rating" -- the degree to which a
drug produces tolerance, emotional and physical dependence, physical
deterioration and antisocial behavior in those under its influence or those
withdrawing from it -- is 24, much higher than that of heroin (16) and
cocaine (14), and ridiculously higher than that of marijuana (8). Yet
alcohol is not just tolerated in many cultures, it's frequently exalted.

Courtwright points to the alcohol industry's "size and fiscal importance"
to account for the drug's unassailable legality and social cachet.

He does note that scientists have found moderate drinking to be healthful,
and he observes that "humanity ... has long experience of alcohol, and has
evolved all manner of rules and taboos to reduce the harmfulness of
drinking." But human beings have done more than just ameliorate alcohol's
negative effects. We've turned the making and drinking of alcohol into a
venerable tradition, one that may depend on the high that alcohol delivers
but one that also can't be reduced to a mere buzz.

Cartwright doesn't acknowledge it, but the process of making alcoholic
beverages has given rise to sophisticated craftsmanship -- some might even
call it art. To wine drinkers, the difference between a New Zealand
sauvignon blanc and a California cabernet is vast and important, and
matching them with the proper foods requires knowledge and imagination. And
as he notes, in France, Italy and Spain, alcoholism rates are very low and
public drunkenness is frowned on, yet nearly every adult drinks.

In these cultures, alcohol has been integrated into the social fabric and
is inextricable from the concept of "the good life."

In contrast to the array of alcoholic beverages that Western civilization
has developed and matched to particular moments of life (champagne goes
with celebrations, white wine goes with elegant fare, beer goes with
watching football on the tube and so on), the distinctions between brands
of cigarettes are mainly a matter of marketing.

Perhaps that's partly why, of the big three, tobacco is faring the worst
these days; its cultural roots are just not deep enough.

With many municipalities banning smoking in restaurants and even bars,
cigarettes have been largely exiled from the civilized table, where
caffeine and alcohol have been prettied up by the gourmet delivery systems
of wine and coffee.

Connoisseurship disguises well the irresistible craving for a buzz. As
Courtwright puts it, "Tobacco ... is becoming a loser's drug." While their
caffeine-addicted friends can now find a Starbucks on every corner
beckoning them in for a quick hit in a cozy environment, smokers are
reduced to hopping around on freezing sidewalks outside office buildings.

No longer do cigarettes serve as "the small change of sociability," in
Courtwright's phrase, or help a woman appear more independent and
sophisticated, as they once did for countless Hollywood actresses. "I would
date a woman who smokes," a male friend once told me, "as long as she
doesn't walk down the street smoking." At first I thought he was making
some sort of distinction between "feminine" and "unfeminine" behavior, but
now I think his prejudice has more to do with the fact that a walking
smoker announces the fact that she's addicted to nicotine, not just engaged
in the elegant little social ritual of lighting up in a restaurant with
friends or while lying in bed with a lover.

Dragging on a cigarette while she's navigating the street, she lays bare
the fact that she is an addict, engaged in the self-directed spiral of
feeding her own high.

Stripped of its social trappings as it increasingly is, smoking is
beginning to appear as nothing more interesting than a smelly,
breath-fouling, teeth-staining, illness-causing personal addiction.

That doesn't mean that the cigarette has gasped its last -- there still is,
for many people, a surge of pleasure that comes from lighting up. That's
not going away soon, but it certainly will become more difficult to get as
regulation spreads from restaurants to outdoor spaces such as parks.

What Courtwright calls the growing "lower-class concentration" of tobacco
also makes it more politically vulnerable as well.

Caffeine, in Courtwright's book, emerges triumphant among its mind-altering
brethren as the least harmful, most life-enhancing drug yet discovered.
It's the earth's most widely used drug, with a per capita consumption of 70
milligrams a day. Caffeine alters brain chemistry in notable ways,
producing euphoric effects such as a rush of energy and an elevation of
mood. It's addictive in the sense that tolerance increases the more you use
it and withdrawal can lead to symptoms such as headaches and lethargy.
Nonetheless, the drug's negative side effects, however troublesome, are not
dire; too much caffeine causes nothing worse than insomnia or tremors.

Precious few lives are ruined by caffeine, though intrepid researchers,
Courtwright reports, have isolated a "syndrome" that affects some serious
users -- a condition that would no doubt make an addict of any other
substance laugh derisively: These people "go to extremes to obtain
caffeinated drinks, use them in dangerous or inappropriate situations, and
continue drinking them despite adverse health consequences and warnings by
their physicians." The famously coffee-mad French novelist Honore de Balzac
is often used as an example; he died from heart disease apparently
exacerbated by his habit.

And doctors like to warn that the jury is still out on other potential
health problems that may be caused by regular caffeine consumption.

Still, all in all, the social costs of our love affair with caffeine are
remarkably low, and its role as a spur to productivity and an aid to coping
with the more difficult, sad and painful aspects of life gives the plucky
little molecule a strongly positive aura. Even more than the other players
in Courtwright's "psychoactive revolution," it's hard to imagine the modern
world without it. Yet like the well-behaved daughter who watches as her
noisier, more unruly siblings suck up her parents' attention, caffeine
mainly lingers in the margins of Courtwright's history.

Fortunately -- for hardcore caffeine aficionados at least -- another recent
book, "The World of Caffeine" by Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K.
Bealer, is very likely the ultimate compendium of the political and social
history, science, lore and arcana of "the world's most popular drug," as
the subtitle brags.

This fact-packed book is the work of a science writer (Bealer) and a
scientist (Weinberg), but it's written at such a fever pitch of interest in
its subject that its authors appear to have been dipping into the research
material with an extremely liberal hand. "Can there be any doubt that, if
and when there are settlements on Mars, coffeehouses will be among the
first amenities available to the emigres?" they enthuse.

There's much to be learned in this book about such mysteries as the
chemistry that makes caffeine so effective, even if you have to wade
through the authors' insistent, overblown and often repetitive prose.

They come at you with such aggressively tumescent notions as "caffeine is
like the air." As they explain that one, "You don't see it and usually
hardly notice it, but it's there all the same, and it becomes part of you
in a critical metabolic exchange that involves every cell in your body." If
caffeine is really all this book cracks it up to be, demagogues looking to
start a new religion should pay close attention: When science shades so
easily into zealotry, you know you're in the presence of something truly
powerful.